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Kids are going through trauma. Staff are getting assaulted. ‘We are all in the trenches together’

Caregivers at Ontario’s group homes deal with chilling violence and low pay while struggling to help kids with serious problems, a Star investigation has found. Workers from the Lindsay-area group home where a fire killed two people this year reveal new details about the tragedy and speak out about the deeply flawed child protection system.

The caregivers of Quaker Rd. don’t scare easily. They bear the wounds of their commitment without complaint — a bald spot where hair was ripped out, scars where bites removed chunks of flesh, more punches and kicks to the head than anyone should ever have to count.

The last thing they want is to portray the children they cared for in two group homes, on the same rural property near Lindsay, Ont., as monsters. The cruelty, they say, is in a child protection system that warehouses its most vulnerable kids while giving their caregivers almost no support.

More difficult to explain and overcome is the trauma that haunts Perry and her Quaker Rd. colleagues.

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On a recent fall morning, five of them reunited for the first time at their former workplace, where on Feb. 24 a fire in the girls’ home marked their lives forever. It killed their colleague, Andrea Reid, a 43-year-old mother of three, and Kassy Finbow, a 14-year-old resident of the home.

The women gathered amid tears and hugs of comfort.

“This is another step in the healing,” said Sheila Triggs, who was trapped with Reid and Kassy in an upstairs bedroom as the fire raged.

They stood on a dirt driveway in the morning chill, surrounded by fields of brown corn stalks. Nothing is left of the home that was consumed by smoke and flames. The initials of the dead are carved on a majestic maple.

The initials of the dead are carved on a tree at the property. Worker Andrea Reid, 43, and resident Kassy Finbow, 14, perished in the fire. (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star)

A second group home — where horrified children and caregivers witnessed the fire from 10 metres away — has been shuttered and sold.

Equally heartbreaking is that another girl they cared for, a developmentally challenged 17-year-old, is accused of setting the fire and is charged with murder.

The blaze has triggered multiple investigations by police, government officials, children’s aid societies and the Toronto Star. They reveal a child protection system that doesn’t know if minimal standards of care are being met, has no qualifications for caregivers, and is governed by a ministry scrambling to perform its oversight role.

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The ministry doesn’t know how many children are being cared for in Ontario’s 389 licensed group homes. It’s working on a system that will eventually allow it to collect the information.

At the end of September 2017, the group homes had 2,914 beds, almost one-third of them operated by private, for-profit companies. The rest are run by non-profit agencies such as children’s aid societies.

Another 2,005 beds were in foster homes run by companies, where the limit is four kids to a home. A growing number of kids are also being placed in unlicensed homes with live-in staff.

“There are lots of kids in group homes all over Ontario and they are not doing well — and everybody knows it,” says Kiaras Gharabaghi, a member of a government-appointed panel that examined the residential care system in 2016.

“You know your system is based on the flimsiest of foundations when you have absolutely no standards on who can do this work,” adds Gharabaghi, director of Ryerson University’s school of child and youth care.

The impact on both staff and children in group homes is so dire it has pushed Quaker Rd.’s caregivers to speak out for the first time. In exclusive interviews, they provide an inside look into the ill-fated homes and into a system where the needs of caregivers and children are not being met.

Children taken from abusive or neglectful parents are usually placed in group homes as a last resort, after struggling with foster parents unable to deal with them.

Most are treated with psychotropic drugs and left largely in the care of workers who typically get a starting salary hovering at minimum wage, with no benefits.

It’s an often dangerous job that can leave caregivers grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder and social stigma.

“I care for high-needs kids that nobody wants in their backyard,” said Triggs, 56. “I’ve been through rapes with kids, I’ve been through abortions, I’ve been through deaths of a parent — I’ve been through puberty with five boys at one time.

Sheila Triggs barely escaped the deadly fire with the help of firefighters. She ended up getting into her job by chance, after she filled in during an understaffed weekend. (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star)

“And people need to hear about the expertise it takes to do all of that while working with kids who don’t want to be where they are.”

Charlie Menendez, a psychologist who worked as a paid consultant at Quaker Rd. until 2016, witnessed a group home system where “the lowest-paid people are expected to help the highest-needs kids with virtually no specialized supports.

“The result is staff who either stay for brief periods and leave for easier work, or staff who stay because they are dedicated to helping kids no matter what. And those dedicated staff too often get hurt.”

The environment isn’t safe for anyone, according to documents obtained through a freedom-of-information request.

Group homes are required by law to report serious incidents to the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, including injuries, runaways, physical restraints and allegations of abuse.

The Star obtained every report from the Quaker Rd. homes — totalling almost 2,000 pages — from 2015 to February 2017, when they closed. The almost daily outbursts they describe are frightening.

The homes served children aged 6 to 17. In 2015, when they rarely had more than six residents each, a total of 329 serious incidents were reported. Of those, 290 involved kids being physically restrained during outbursts, according to the Star’s analysis.

Although there is no place on the reports to officially note staff injuries, the detailed descriptions reveal most incidents resulted in caregivers repeatedly punched, kicked, bitten and spat at while trying to prevent kids from hurting themselves or others. Some of the restraints — those where kids are pinned to the floor — lasted an hour.

Convincing caregivers to stay proved difficult, making the commitment of those who stayed seem almost perverse.

“If someone said, ‘Can we punch you 10 times to save a life?’ You’d be, like, ‘Sure, go ahead,’ ” said Perry, who lost a patch of hair during an attack. “If you know you’re saving a life, then it makes it all worth it.”

The owner of the Quaker Rd. property was Mark Williams, who operated a company called Hawk Homes. He ran a home for girls and another for both boys and girls. In September 2016, he rented them to a company called Connor Homes.

The property was in the middle of nowhere. Flies were so thick in the summer that caregivers would pay kids 10 cents for each one they killed inside the homes. Wasps carried a 25-cent bounty.

On the afternoon of the fire, the accused girl was eating fruit at the dining room table of the girls’ home. She had arrived months earlier from a First Nations reserve almost 2,000 kilometres away.

She was 17, but caregivers say she had the mental capacity of a preschooler. She was solid and heavyset, and rarely caused trouble. Her smile was infectious.

Kassy Finbow, a Crown ward, was also in the house that day. She had been placed in care two years earlier, when her mother could no longer manage her outbursts. She arrived at Quaker Rd. in October 2016 after several foster placements didn’t work out.

The only other resident of the home was away with her caregiver on a community outing.

The older girl asked Triggs if she could speak with her worker at the northern Ontario child and family services agency that placed her in the home.

The short phone call about where she would live when she turned 18 upset the teen. (Her mother had died a few years earlier.) She slammed down the phone and stormed outside. Triggs kept an eye on her from the front step.

The girl returned and lunged at Triggs — the first time she had ever been violent toward her. The established protocol called for caregivers to lock themselves in the main-floor office when the teen acted out, rather than risk injury with a physical restraint.

Triggs and Reid instead joined Kassy in her upstairs bedroom and locked the door.

Reid was the only one with a cellphone. Triggs told her to call the OPP to take the girl to the local hospital’s crisis unit.

“Andrea and I both recognized that this wasn’t just a normal upset, there was something bigger,” Triggs told the Star.

Triggs doesn’t remember how long Reid was on the phone. The reception was not good and she got cut off at least once. Police asked a lot of questions. Shortly after she hung up, they heard the fire alarm.

Kids would often pull the fire alarm when upset. So the caregivers wondered if it was a ploy.

“We were thinking, we step out, she’s there, she attacks us again, because we did see the physical danger of her in that instance,” Triggs said.

Triggs and Reid then heard the teen shout: “Come on, come on.” It sounded to Triggs like the girl wanted to fight.

Next, they heard someone yell the house was on fire.

“And then Andrea and I are, like, ‘Oh my God.’ ”

Caregiver Andrea Reid, left, and Kassy Finbow, 14, died in the February fire. (Facebook)

Quaker Rd.’s caregivers gave interviews with great reluctance. They toil in troubled jobs, where blame flows downhill. They feared betraying the trust of children, of giving authorities ammunition to abolish group homes, of not clearly stressing the urgent need for far more supports.

When they finally talked, they came across as tough, experienced and blunt.

Most come from backgrounds similar to those of the kids they care for.

Katrina Wylie, a thin 32-year-old with soft brown eyes, was born into a poor and troubled Toronto family. Wylie spent her early years in and out of shelters.

When Wylie was 6 and her brother was 3, children’s aid placed them with foster parents in Ajax. Wylie spent the rest of her childhood with them; when she married, her foster dad walked her down the aisle. Her brother wasn’t so lucky. He suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, had bouts of aggression and bounced through several placements.

Another caregiver, Shawna Angiers, also grew up in poverty. She is 31 and won’t go into details. She moved from Oshawa to Kawartha Lakes as a child and says her family, which includes five siblings, had the kind of trouble that should have triggered intervention by children’s aid.

Brandy Perry had similar childhood struggles. Her father took his own life when she was 9. A Kawartha Lakes native, she acted out as a child and felt early on that school officials and others had labelled her a “bad kid.”

Perry first set foot in the Quaker Rd. homes 14 years ago as a student intern from Fleming College’s correctional services program. She immediately identified with the kids.

“I know what it feels like to not be accepted and to have people not understand you and to feel that maybe the world is just against you,” said Perry, 35, echoing her colleagues. “So when I started working with these kids, it just felt right. I found it really easy to make connections with them and to understand.”

Triggs had an altogether different upbringing. She was born in Scotland and grew up “in Beaver Cleaver’s home”; she never saw her parents argue, and her needs were always met.

Her family came to Canada and settled in Brampton when she was 6. She moved to a rural property near Lindsay after she married and had two children.

She became a residential care worker by chance in 1999 when Quaker Rd. was short-staffed and her husband, a youth corrections worker, was asked if his wife could work a weekend overnight shift.

“I was fascinated by the sad stories,” said Triggs, who had no formal training in child and youth care. “I didn’t know group homes existed. I didn’t know kids were taken from their families. It just was not something that was part of my world.”

She became a foster parent to four children during her 18 years at Quaker Rd. The first, now a 22-year-old woman with a developmental disability, continues to live with her.

The homes were calmer back then. Few of the kids had complex needs and most would stay for years, giving caregivers time to build strong relationships.

In recent years, provincial policy favoured family-based foster care. Kids arrived at Quaker Rd. after five foster care breakdowns, on average. Every now and then, a kid with more than 20 moves showed up.

Care worker Brandy Perry: "If someone said, 'Can we punch you 10 times to save a life' You'd be, like, 'Sure, go ahead.' If you know you're saving a life, then it makes it all worth it." (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star)

Perry recalls one boy who was moved three times in 48 hours. He wasn’t even warned about one of the moves; he was “under the impression they were going out for ice cream.”

The kids sometimes showed up with their belongings in garbage bags. At Quaker Rd., staff bought suitcases for kids who moved. The message was a simple one: “You are not disposable.” But personal belongings would inevitably be left behind.

“That speaks to their experience in care: everywhere they go, they lose a little bit of themselves,” Angiers said.

The children suffer from the trauma of abuse and abandonment, compounded by a range of disorders. It’s common for group homes to have a child struggling with autism, another with fetal alcohol syndrome, another with suicidal ideation, and others with a range of other psychiatric and developmental disorders.

“We found no evidence that group care programs are prepared for, qualified for, or in any way suitable for all the clients they admit,” the government-appointed panel of experts concluded in 2016.

And stays are shorter, often no more than a few months, partly due to the ministry push for family-based care. With less time for staff to establish routines and relationships, Quaker Rd.’s homes became more chaotic.

Charlie Menendez, a psychologist who worked with youth and staff at Hawk Residential Care and Treatment Homes, talked to the caregivers after the deadly fire. (Jim Rankin/Toronto Star)

Menendez, the psychologist, notes that children with developmental trauma internalize that they’re “bad kids” and act accordingly. They also protect themselves by severely testing new staff, lest they become attached only to watch them leave.

“They put up their walls and say, ‘You’ll only last two weeks. You’re a pussy. You’re not going to make it,’ ” Triggs said. “And then they go out of their way to push that (staff) away because it’s so much easier to push you away than to be rejected. And that’s what staff are welcomed with.”

To avoid nasty surprises, Quaker Rd. supervisors would graphically describe to job applicants the kind of violence they would likely encounter. Triggs would show them the large bite scar on her left shoulder. “That’s my war wound, I would tell them.”

A quarter of those hired would quit on the first day. More than 80 per cent didn’t last a year, according to Wylie, who managed one of the homes. A starting salary of $13 an hour wasn’t much incentive to stick around.

“It’s really hard to convince someone to get beat up every day when you could be frying up burgers at McDonald’s for the same amount of money,” Angiers said.

Angiers’s first day at Quaker Rd., in 2007, was “complete chaos.” The caregiver who was supposed to mentor her called in sick. Two other caregivers were busy trying to calm and eventually restrain a youth, which left Angiers alone to manage the other seven kids.

“I had kids yelling at me, trying to scare me,” she said. “They kicked open a door — do I stop them?” A youth taunted Angiers, predicting she wouldn’t last two weeks.

Care worker Shawna Angiers, 31, who grew up in poverty, says staff at Quaker Rd. bought suitcases for kids who moved. The message was "You are not disposable." (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star)

“I remember thinking, ‘What did I just walk into?’ It was like deer in the headlights. Wow,” said Angiers, who began her career with a college diploma in social work.

Four years later, a boy attacked Angiers, injuring her spine. She was off work for two weeks.

It’s not the kind of story she brings home if she can avoid it.

“I actually don’t talk to my husband about work,” said Angiers, who has a 4-year-old son. “He’s been angry when I’ve been hurt, he’s tried to convince me not to go back, he’s spoken poorly about the job and about the kids, and it ultimately just makes me angry because he doesn’t understand. And I would rather spend my time and energy helping the kids than helping my husband understand it.”

She eventually became the manager of a third Hawk group home in Lindsay.

Wylie was hired by Hawk Homes in 2009, two weeks after earning a bachelor of social work degree, with honours, at Carleton University. At the time, the coed group home had two girls and six boys.

“You’re thrown right in,” Wylie said in a clipped, matter-of-fact way. “You don’t get much of an orientation.”

She worked six or seven days a week, often more than 16 hours a shift. If a child ended up in hospital, Wylie would stay with the child overnight. She once worked 22 hours straight.

“Some days were good — going on outings with some of those kids was definitely memorable. Some days you’re just pulling your hair out like, ‘Why am I still here?’ ” Wylie said.

She worked while pregnant, continuing to restrain kids when she had to. She slipped and fell during one melee and rushed to the hospital to make sure her baby was fine.

Katrina Wylie, who herself was placed with foster parents when she was 6, had a good relationship with her foster family. Later she managed one of the Quaker Rd. homes. (FRED THORNHILL for the Toronto Star)

“We didn’t like giving up on kids because we knew we were their last resort,” she said.

A typically wild outburst occurred Dec. 3, 2015. A boy returned to the group home in a good mood after a visit with his dad, but soon began to complain he had nothing to play with in his room. The next moment he was swearing at a caregiver and threatening her with a butter knife.

In the serious occurrence report obtained by the Star, the boy’s name is redacted and caregivers are identified only by their initials. But there’s no mistaking the violence once a caregiver tries to restrain the boy.

The boy freed himself from staff member AM’s hold by “butting her in the head twice, breaking her glasses.” The boy then grabbed a second staff, identified as CV, “and slammed her into a kitchen wall, holding her against it by the throat as he continued to punch her in the head.” He then “brought his knee up and started kneeing staff CV in the head while holding her down by the hair.”

The boy then “turned and kneed Staff AM in the ribs several times” before “head-butting both Staff CV and AM.” The outburst ended with the boy smashing the side mirror of CV’s car.

Both staff were treated for injuries at Lindsay’s Ross Memorial Hospital.

Later in December, two caregivers were forced to flee and lock the office door while boys ransacked the home, because their request to go to the Oshawa Centre mall was denied. They “began trashing the house (and) throwing the dishes, garbage and laundry around the kitchen,” before “throwing the Christmas tree around” and pouring “several pots of water” on the floor, according to a report to the ministry.

Police were called and the leader of the revolt was arrested.

'It’s really hard to convince someone to get beat up every day when you could be frying up burgers at McDonald’s for the same amount of money'

Shawna Angiers

Caregiver

In September 2016, a girl smashed Triggs on the head with a fence pole. Triggs finished her workday and woke up the next morning with a bump on her forehead and a black eye. She downplays the incident by comparing it to others where staff sustained broken arms.

Despite the dangers, residential care workers are not entitled to benefits under the Workplace Safety Insurance Act. “You have workers who are trying to care for children and they are not feeling cared for themselves,” says Stephanie Stokes, 26, who became a Quaker Rd. caregiver in 2015.

Practices to help control behaviour at Quaker Rd. included a “level system” whereby good behaviours raised kids to higher rungs with more privileges, including the use of video games, and bad behaviours had the opposite effect.

Some kids flew into rages when threatened with downgrades. One boy announced that since he was to be busted to the lowest level, he might as well do whatever he wants, and proceeded to attack staff and their cars, at one point coming at them with “a large piece of wood.”

Yet the caregivers said they were determined to build trust, making clear to children that no matter what their behaviour, they were there for them.

“Just listening and making sure that after behaviours that most people would run from, you come back and say, ‘I’m not angry at you, let’s talk about why,’ ” Angiers said. “And reassuring them that they’re not bad people.”

A common refrain is that “kids are not their behaviours.” Triggs said staff “always took ownership” of the violence, questioning what they might have done differently.

She described a desperate solidarity.

“We are all in the trenches together,” she said. “There are the kids who are going through trauma, there are the staff who are getting assaulted.”

A year ago, a girl smashed Quaker Rd. caregiver Sheila Triggs on the head with a fence pole. Triggs finished her workday and woke up the next morning with a bump on her forehead and a black eye. (Supplied)

Staffing levels had also become desperate during Quaker Rd.’s last years.

“Our screening process for staff was definitely not up to snuff, for sure,” Wylie said. “We were just pretty much pulling people in — we’d do an interview with them and just hire them. Some of them were horrible.”

She has seen some workers “yelling and screaming at the kids or telling them to, ‘Come on and fight me!’ ”

In 2016, a male caregiver was fired for twice trying to strangle a boy during an altercation, according to a serious occurrence report.

Part of the problem lies in a striking fact: Ontario has no minimum education requirement for group home caregivers. Anyone can be hired as long as they pass a police record check, review a ministry manual on policies and procedures, and complete an eight-hour course on physical restraints, managing aggressive behaviour, and crisis intervention.

The lack of professional standards has been noted in numerous reports during the past decade that have described Ontario’s residential care system as dysfunctional. The most recent, by the 2016 expert panel, lambasted a system where the government can’t even keep track of kids in residential care, let alone ensure they’re being treated properly.

The Ministry of Children and Youth Services spends $1.5 billion annually on a child protection system that serves some 14,000 kids taken from abusive or neglectful parents and helps many more in their own homes.

In 2016-17, children’s aid societies spent $231.2 million of that money on “outside paid resources,” the term usually used for group homes and foster homes run, for profit, by private companies.

Ministry oversight has been widely criticized as grossly inadequate. By the spring of 2016, however, the Quaker Rd. homes had finally caught the ministry’s attention.

They were bought in May by Mark Williams, who had operated them for years under the previous owners. He paid $485,000 and took out two mortgages at high interest rates, according to property records.

He received a ministry-approved per diem of $269.35 for each of the eight children in the homes when their one-year licences were renewed. Similar rates have proved lucrative for some group home owners. But Williams struggled to keep staff and to satisfy the financial demands of his bank.

By the time he owned Hawk Homes, the Kawartha-Haliburton Children’s Aid Society had compiled more than 100 incidents of concern — mostly involving the two on Quaker Rd. and one in Lindsay — from 2001 to 2016. The 20-page report, obtained through freedom of information, was emailed to the ministry on April 8, 2016, and discussed at a meeting with a senior official.

Many of the allegations — some verified, others not — involved concerns about the safety of children due to a lack of supervision, inappropriate conduct by staff, and the use of excessive force during physical restraints.

On June 30, 2016, the society’s executive director, Jennifer Wilson, wrote the ministry with six more incidents of concern, including one that involved a boy who alleged he was sexually assaulted by another boy in a Quaker Rd. home that month.

“The severity of risk and harm to residents appears to be escalating and young people placed at Hawk Homes are at risk of harm given the questionable levels of supervision and care being provided, without adequate and immediate intervention from the ministry,” she wrote.

Williams said he had no comment about the Kawartha society’s file because he was unaware of its existence until the Star brought it to his attention.

Eight days after Wilson’s June 30 email, ministry officials had yet to respond. So she emailed them again, stressing she was “very concerned” for the safety of children.

“There was silence,” Wilson said in an interview.

The next day, after an investigation by Kawartha CAS of the alleged sexual assault, children’s aid societies pulled their kids out of the coed home.

That month, inspectors from the ministry came down hard on Williams when his licences for the two homes came up for renewal. Having renewed the licences without conditions in 2015, inspectors now cited 65 pages’ worth of problems with training, policies and procedures, according to inspection documents obtained through freedom of information.

Williams said ministry inspectors conducting the 2016 licence review got tougher when an incident occurred in the middle of the process.

“Files that were compliant initially became non-compliant after the incident,” Williams said. He didn’t name the incident but serious occurrence reports suggest it was the alleged sexual assault.

Menendez describes the ministry’s sudden crackdown on Quaker Rd. as typical of a punitive system failing to provide supports, including psychologists to draft and monitor individualize treatment plans.

“The system avoids its responsibility for the situation with a narrative that says, ‘It’s a bad place, we will punish it and close it down, and everything will be OK,’ ” Menendez says.

The view from the road at 723-725 Quaker Rd., where the boys' home could be seen in a picture earlier this year following the fire at the girls' home. The boys home has since closed. (Jim Rankin/Toronto Star)

Williams surrendered his licences and, in September, rented his Quaker Rd. homes to Bob Connor, head of Connor Homes and then president of the Ontario Association of Residences Treating Youth, which represents group home operators. Connor, who runs 30 foster and group homes, kept some of Hawk’s staff but made them independent contractors, without benefits.

Connor also turned the group homes into staffed foster homes, limited to four kids each. And the coed home became a boys’ home. The new foster homes were never inspected; unlike group homes, foster homes don’t require annual on-site inspections. And fire safety regulations are less stringent.

The lower number of kids made the homes less chaotic: serious occurrences fell significantly. The Quaker Rd. houses, the caregivers say, started to feel like real homes.

On Feb. 24, Katrina Wylie was supposed to start her shift in the girls’ house at 4 p.m., minutes after the fire broke out. But she was having trouble finding a babysitter for her two children, now 6 and 5, and got approval from Triggs to start two hours later.

It was an unusually calm Friday afternoon in the boys’ home, so manager Shawna Angiers sent her second staff person home early.

As the caregiver got to her car, she saw the girl who was upset by the phone call attacking the car of staff who had just arrived.

The teen, who has limited language, was saying, “I smell smoke. I smell smoke.”

The caregiver going off-shift phoned Angiers to say she would try to calm the teen before she left.

“And in that same breath she said: ‘Oh my God, the house is on fire,’ ” Angiers said.

At first, Angiers wasn’t alarmed. Kids had lit fires on the property before.

“I’m thinking, maybe I should bring over the fire extinguisher and we’ll put it out,” she recalled.

She called 911 anyway. Kawartha Fire Service logs show the first call from the property came at 3:43 p.m. The first fire truck arrived eight minutes later.

When Angiers went to investigate, black smoke was so thick she couldn’t see the girls’ house. She ran back to evacuate the three boys in her house.

In the girls' home, the second-storey window at the far left was too small to allow the caregivers and 14-year-old Kassy Finbow to escape the fire. Sheila Triggs barely got out, when firefighters smashed it and lifted her to safety. (Supplied)

While leaving, she was startled by the image of a police officer suddenly appearing from the cloud of smoke. He had likely arrived in response to Reid’s call for assistance.

Angiers slowly drove away with her boys, negotiating an obstacle course of emergency vehicles. She saw flames shooting out the windows and front door and could hear Triggs and Reid screaming for help

“I’m looking at that and thinking, they are not getting out.”

Kassy was trapped in her second-floor bedroom with caregivers Triggs and Reid. Triggs insists little time elapsed from the fire alarm going off and the discussion on whether it was a ploy to lure them to a fight, to the sight of smoke pushing through both sides of the locked bedroom door.

“There was nothing, and then there was this wall of smoke coming through,” she said.

Reid considered opening the door, but Triggs said the fire safety plan had trained them not to under those conditions.

The room had a large sliding glass door with panels bolted shut by a wooden beam screwed into the track. The only other possible exit was a window 56 centimetres (22 inches) wide, with a side slide opening of just 28 centimetres (11 inches).

The women first attacked the sliding door.

On the other side of it was a balcony, a sure means of escape if they could reach it. They pulled out the dresser drawers and started smashing them against the panels. But the tempered glass held fast.

Kassy went to her closet to look for a sharp object that might work. Triggs ran to the window, frantically trying to widen its 28-centimetre gap by lifting the window panes “up and out.” They wouldn’t budge.

Triggs could see staff from the boys’ house outside. Reid and Kassy joined Triggs at the window and all three screamed for help.

And then Kassy and Reid collapsed “simultaneously” to the floor, overcome by smoke, Triggs said.

Triggs stuck her head out the window, gasping for air. Wind blew the smoke toward her from outside. By the time firefighters had their ladders at the window, her face was black.

Triggs had to move away for firefighters to break the window. But breathing was so difficult that she reflexively moved back toward the glass as it shattered in her face.

“And then I just got pulled out by my shoulders.”

Triggs wandered around the property in a daze before being taken to hospital, where doctors worked to save Reid and Kassy.

Informed of the fire by Angiers, Perry rushed to the scene and later joined the vigil of family and friends in the waiting room. The news was mostly bad. “It was heartbreaking,” she said.

The ground floor in the aftermath of the deadly group home fire at 725 Quaker Rd. in Oakwood, Ont., near Lindsay. A caregiver and a 14-year-old foster child died in February 2017. (Supplied)

Triggs was intubated in intensive care, placed in an induced coma, then transported by ambulance to Toronto, where she received hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

“People ask … why didn’t we go out the door? And I really don’t think we (initially) thought we were going to die,” Triggs said.

“At the end, before the fireman came up the ladder … I was saying things like, ‘I’m going to die.’ I really, really thought I was going to die.”

Reid is remembered by her colleagues as someone you could count on in a melee, as a caregiver who “mothered” children and took them ice fishing near her home on Dalrymple Lake.

Her family plans to launch lawsuits against Connor Homes and the children’s ministry, claiming they failed to provide a safe workplace. Bob Connor has said his homes meet — and exceed — required safety standards.

In a statement to the Star in May, Finbow said her daughter had shown “great improvement” while at Quaker Rd., “and for the first time in a long time, I had hope that she would return home at some point.

“Kassy was a beautiful young lady with so much potential,” she added.

The girl accused of setting the fire is expected to enter a plea at a court hearing early in the new year.

In April, Triggs was summoned to a meeting by the Kawartha-Haliburton Children’s Aid Society, which conducted an investigation after the fire. Also present were representatives of Durham children’s aid and two ministry officials.

Kawartha CAS attributed Kassy’s death to “harm by omission, unsafe living environment, caregiving skills, caregiver inability to protect, as well as neglect of physical needs,” according to a society letter Triggs gave the Star. Triggs said the findings were directed at her.

“I cried and I yelled at them,” she said. “I pointed the finger right back at them.”

She noted the homes were inspected annually by the ministry, children’s aid societies and the Kawartha Lakes fire department. “Everybody knew about the windows being sealed; that was transparent, that was never a secret in the system.”

Still, survivor’s guilt weighs heavy on Triggs.

“A big piece for me is … why was I at the front of the window?” said Triggs. “I think I was saved because I had more fresh air than they did.

“Are people going to blame me? That’s how I feel. But nowhere in my mind did I ever know they were in a worse state than me.”

She continues to work with Connor Homes, as does Angiers. Wylie works at a homeless shelter in Lindsay and with the local school board, providing one-on-one support for kids with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Triggs, Angiers and Perry are also in therapy, dealing with their trauma from the fire. In Menendez’s office recently, the psychologist tried to ease their pain.

“We all know something has to change,” he told them. “You guys are getting hurt, the kids are getting hurt, and lives are being lost.”

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